Al Hunt: Why the U.S. Government Can’t Be Downsized: “He ridiculed the populist-sounding arguments of Trump adviser Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who say, for example, that tax cuts would help firemen since a resulting surge in stocks would help their retirement plans. Most firemen have defined-benefit pension plans that wouldn’t be affected, Summers noted…” https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-07/why-the-u-s-government-can-t-be-downsized

Adair Turner: Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?: “Our standard mental model of productivity growth reflects the transition from agriculture to industry…. Much design, branding, and advertising activity is also essentially zero-sum…. Choice and human creativity are valuable per se. But we have no reason to believe that 2050’s designs and brands will make us any happier than those of 2017…” https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/is-productivity-growth-becoming-irrelevant

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Donald Trump Is the First White President: “With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them…. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit…” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/